Donald Trump’s henchmen in the Trump-Russia scandal are even bigger idiots than we thought

| 5:50 pm EDT June 19, 2018
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I’m never sure how fair it is to quote the television show The West Wing as a guidepost for real-world politics, because Jed Bartlet’s presidency was fictional. Then again, Donald Trump’s presidency is also fictional, so here we are. In one West Wing scene, an FBI agent tells the President that no amount of good investigative work is ever as effective as criminals being stupid. I’m reminded of that quote when I look at the latest revelations about Donald Trump’s henchmen in the Trump-Russia scandal.

The thing about encrypted mobile communication apps like WhatsApp is that there’s literally no way for outsiders to hack in and see your messages. I’m not saying it’s extraordinarily difficult; I’m saying there’s no such thing. It would be the equivalent of getting blood out of a turnip. WhatsApp conversations never exist on any server, meaning there’s nowhere for anyone to hack in. So unless you give someone your password, they’re not seeing your messages.

That is, of course, unless you grossly misuse WhatsApp by doing something like backing up your messages to the cloud. If you’ll forgive the simplistic analogies, this would be like having a secret meeting room that no outsider can enter or tap into, and then recording your secret conversations and setting the tapes out on the front stoop for the taking.

When we recently learned that Paul Manafort did in fact back up his WhatsApp to the cloud, it was a laugh-out-loud moment. He went to the trouble of using a cloak and dagger app for his illegal obstruction of justice conversations, yet he didn’t bother to ask anyone knowledgeable to explain to him how to do it correctly. Now new court filings reveal that the Feds have also gotten their hands on Michael Cohen’s WhatsApp messages, because he didn’t bother to learn how to do it correctly either. These people are idiots.